Anaïs Quesson
"It's your choice, if you want to stop walking in the shadow of other people's words."
An Interview with Failure by Sam Yankelevitch is an insightful novel that will for sure shake your views on life.
Robin Finch runs a podcast called Wake Up and Leap Forward. In this special episode, he invites Failure for an interview. Together, they break the fear of Failure's name down to the root.
The interview is divided into eleven parts. Each part has valuable advice for the reader/listener, blended with humor and relatability. Each teaching is focused on positivity and learning from your mistakes. Failure is not something to be afraid of, it is only a word. It is also not necessarily the opposite of success. Words can have any meaning, so choose the ones that are the most helpful to you.
The most important teaching I will keep after reading this book is probably that mistakes are opportunities to move forward and improve at each milestone. Overall I loved the positivity and optimism of Yankelevitch's story-telling.
The writing style was slightly confusing at first. Indeed, the whole book is written just as a podcast script. Robin and Failure talk with each other, there is no narration whatsoever. The only distinction between the two characters is that Failure's lines are written in bold print.
Once you get used to it, however, you can fully appreciate all the advice and insights Yankelevitch has to offer. The shortness of this book (only 80 pages) and this unique writing style make it easy and fast to read. It is both relatable and unique. If, like me, you read with a little voice inside of your head, it will just feel as if you were listening to Robin's podcast.
The punctuation is sometimes over-used, some sentences could have easily been shortened. However, I did not notice any grammatical errors and I can say that this book was professionally edited.
To conclude, I rate this book 5 out of 5 stars.
I might have disliked the writing style at first, but I couldn't help but finish it in only a few days. It has taught me a lot and I will try to reuse Yankelevitch's advice in my daily life.
This book will shift your way of thinking about success and failure. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
